The Music Taste I Inherited From My Mother

Image from 19th Century Art Illustrated Magazine: The Piano Picture, by James McNeill Whistler

A few years ago, while traveling alone, I played an old Emraan Hashmi playlist for no particular reason. Within seconds, I was no longer sitting in the backseat of a cab in 2022. I was twelve years old again, returning home from school in the scorching afternoon heat, the television in our living room tuned permanently to 9XM while my mother moved around the house doing a dozen things at once. The opening beats of “Zara Sa” and “Tu Hi Meri Shab Hai” brought back details I hadn’t consciously remembered in years: the floral nightgowns she wore at home, the smell of tadka drifting out from the kitchen, my half-unzipped school bag collapsing near the sofa, her voice casually singing along to lyrics she knew by heart. 

It unsettled me how vivid the memory felt. The strange thing about music inherited from childhood is that it bypasses nostalgia entirely and enters the body first. Before you have time to intellectualize what you’re feeling, you’re already there again.

I have spent most of my life believing my music taste was self-constructed. That the artists I loved somehow reflected choices I had independently made about who I wanted to become. But the older I grow, the more embarrassing this idea feels. So much of what emotionally moves me was already playing somewhere in the background long before I even knew what taste was.

In India, music taste is rarely developed in isolation. Most people do not discover songs in pristine, deeply intentional ways. We inherit them accidentally through domestic life. Through cassettes left in car stereos for years. Through mothers cooking to old ghazals on Sunday afternoons. Through wedding sangeets, where the same songs appear across generations with almost religious consistency. Through fathers downloading pirated MP3 compilations onto scratched CDs. Through television channels running endlessly in middle-class homes, where silence itself feels unnatural.

Before streaming algorithms, Indian households had mothers.

My mother’s emotional archive exists entirely through music. Her old Nokia phone from around 2010 had “Ajeeb Dastaan Hai Yeh” by Lata Mangeshkar as its ringtone for what felt like an entire decade. Even now, I cannot hear the opening line without picturing her aggressively searching through her oversized handbag in supermarkets while the ringtone continued playing at full volume. During long drives in our Maruti Swift, songs from Ta Ra Rum Pum played so often that my parents and I could sing entire sections without missing a word. On slower evenings, she played Jagjit Singh while cooking dinner, humming under her breath as steam fogged the kitchen windows.

The first song my mother ever loved was “Uthe Sabke Kadam.” My grandfather once told her she looked like a young Tina Munim in it, and, like many compliments given to young girls at the exact right age, it stayed. Even now, when the song plays somewhere faintly at a wedding or through a passing car window, my mother mentions it almost immediately: “Nana used to say I looked like her.” There is always something oddly touching about the way she says this, half joking, half hoping the statement still holds true. For a few seconds afterwards, she seems to carry herself differently. Lighter. As though she has briefly remembered the girl she was before she became my mother.

There is something distinctly South Asian about the way women of my mother’s generation consumed music. So much of it was woven into domestic labor. Songs accompanied cooking, cleaning, folding laundry, getting ready for weddings, and sitting on the floor oiling your daughter’s hair. In many Indian homes, mothers became permanent background figures in everyone else’s memories while music remained one of the few things that still visibly belonged to them. You could tell what kind of mood my mother was in from what played around the house. Asha Bhosle meant she was energetic, probably cleaning aggressively before guests arrived. Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan or Jagjit Singh playing softly from the speakers usually meant she was feeling nostalgic. And then there were the songs from early 2000s Bollywood films, especially the glossy, heartbreak-heavy Emraan Hashmi era that soundtracked so many Indian childhoods in strangely indirect ways.

For years, I resisted most of the music my mother loved. I thought ghazals were painfully slow, old Kishore Kumar songs were outdated, and my generation was somehow superior for discovering music through playlists instead of scratched CDs and radio stations. Then, adulthood humiliates you a little. You go through your first real heartbreak and suddenly find yourself listening to the exact songs your mother once played while staring dramatically out of car windows. Today, I own cassettes of artists I once mocked as well as a vinyl of Nazia Hassan. Sometimes I replay ghazals during long night drives because they make loneliness feel softer, more cinematic, easier to sit inside. What fascinates me now is how early music teaches us emotional language before we even realize it is doing so. Because long before I experienced love myself, I already knew what yearning was supposed to sound like because women like Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle had spent decades singing about heartbreak, devotion and impossible love in the background of my childhood — while homework was being completed at dining tables, while mothers folded laundry, while badly recorded MP3s traveled from one phone to another through Bluetooth.

My mother herself is inseparable from performance. At every family gathering, somebody inevitably requests that she sing “Taal Mile Nadi Ke Jal Mein” because she has been performing it since college. She still remembers entire sections by heart. She used to write lyrics of songs she loved on the backs of notebook pages during lectures. My father once made her a cassette filled with songs they listened to while dating in college, which now feels impossibly romantic in an era where playlists are assembled in under three minutes and forgotten just as quickly. 

Even now, my mother insists my father sing “Jab Koi Baat Bigad Jaaye” with her whenever it plays because, according to her, it has always been “their song.” As a child, I found this deeply embarrassing in the way most visible expressions of parental romance are embarrassing to children. Now, it feels strangely moving to witness a generation that loved each other through cassettes, dedications and songs played repeatedly enough to become part of a marriage itself.

There is also something deeply disorienting about the moment you realize your mother was once young in the exact same way you are young now. Not metaphorically young, but specifically young: sitting in college classrooms writing down lyrics, replaying love songs after arguments, dancing recklessly at weddings, developing crushes, memorising entire ghazals because something inside them felt true. Music often becomes the first evidence of this. It reveals the emotional lives our parents had before we entered the picture.

I used to think my mother simply liked music. What I understand now is that music was one of the ways she documented herself. And without realizing it, she documented parts of me, too.